I’ve read the Courtship of Princess Leia by Dave Wolverton at least a dozen times in my life. It was a book I checked out every few weeks from the library, enchanted by the picture of Princess Leia in a wedding dress on the cover. With all the hype of the new Star Wars movie I decided to revisit this piece of my childhood. I almost wish this book had been made into a movie, it’s full of action, sort of full of romance and bursting with badass women.
The premise of the book is that the Chume’da (Crown Prince) of Hapes, Isolder, has decided he wants to marry Leia and pretty much everyone wants them to get married since Hapes is a wildly wealthy star system and they would devote billions of credits and millions of people to the fight against the remnants of the Empire, in addition to helping the Alderaanian refugees. It’s an all around fabulous opportunity and on top of that the prince is handsome and a genuinely pleasant human being. The only one who doesn’t like this arrangement is Han, who is obviously in love with Leia. For most of the book it’s very hard to like Han Solo as he descends into increasingly desperate measures to keep Leia and Isolder apart. This includes abduction at gunpoint and transport into warlord territory after he wins a planet in a card game and tries to give it to Leia to be New Alderaan.
The planet, Dathomir is home to a collection of Force-using witches, most of whom rival the Sith for power. It’s an action packed race against time to get off the planet without being killed by the warlord or the witches and save Dathomir from destruction. The number of women in general in this book far surpass the men, which is nice considering the original franchise pretty well sticks to one important female character. If you’re a Star Wars fan I highly recommend the read. You don’t need to be caught up with the extended universe at all to follow the book, as long as you have a handle on the main characters you’re good to go with this one.
Thanks for stopping by!
-Erin